


Swear Jar

by FabulaRasa



Category: DCU
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-20
Updated: 2013-05-20
Packaged: 2017-12-12 09:20:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/809941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FabulaRasa/pseuds/FabulaRasa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce tries to teach Jason a lesson. It backfires, as all attempts to teach Jason Todd must inevitably do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Swear Jar

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to the one and only Mithen, SuperBat den mother, for beta-reading this.

"Ow, damn it!" Jason flinched back from the hot stove, sucking on his burnt finger. "Fuck, fuck, _fuck_! Where the hell is Alfred?"

"Jason." Bruce put down his newspaper. "Language."

"I _burned_ my fucking _finger_! Ow, _Jesus!_ It hurts."

Bruce rose, grabbed the wounded hand, and led him to the sink. He ran cold water over the (admittedly sizeable) welt, and reached for an aloe packet in the cabinet. "You know those pads Alfred keeps in the drawer to the left of the stove? Those are what you reach for, if you want to move a pan of boiling water."

"Can't I just reach for a fucking butler?"

Bruce clenched his jaw, fighting down the urge to smack the kid. It was an urge he fought with alarming frequency. "To begin with," he said, biting open the aloe packet and squeezing it onto the finger, "Alfred is not your personal servant. Alfred is responsible for maintaining this house, not the people in it."

"He brings you breakfast," Jason grumbled. 

"An old habit. But if you would like him to bring you a kale and bok choy shake in the morning, I will see what I can do."

Jason grimaced. "No thanks, I'll stick with my ramen, Alfred can stick the kale and bok choy up his ass."

Bruce cast a skeptical glance at the plastic packet beside the stove. "Not sure that's actually food," he said. "But I'll leave that for now. Jason. You know we've talked about language before. You have to learn to control the swearing. Verbal self-restraint is an important form of control. Control is essential to combat. You want to learn combat, don't you?"

Jason's eyes lit. "I'm already the best at combat. Nobody out there can fucking touch me. You saw me, on patrol night before last, you know nobody can take me."

"Really. Care to come at me?"

"Hey, one of these days, old man." Jason's grin was lop-sided. "You just fucking wait."

"Mm hm. And while we're waiting for that day, you're living in my house, and following my rules. And those rules are—"

"No swearing," sighed Jason. "Fine. I know, I know. I'll do better. What the hell ever."

Bruce narrowed his eyes at him. "That's what you said the last five times. I think we need something a little more. . . incentivizing. From now on, every time you swear, that's a dollar in that jar over there. At the end of the week, Alfred gets to keep the money in the jar. You get twenty dollars a week in allowance, so I figure that ought to get you through. . . the next hour or so. After that, you'll have to go into debt, borrowing against next week's allowance. At interest, of course."

"You sure you're not Jewish?" The smack on his head was harder than playful. "Ow, man, what the _fuck?_ "

"Racism gets you five dollars in the jar. So does sexism and homophobia, so enough with the fag jokes, and bitch is not a word I ever want to hear out of your mouth again."

Jason scowled at him. "You gonna do it too? If you swear, you'll pay in?"

"Sure. Now go get ready for school. I'll have something edible ready for you when you come down, without sugar, caffeine, or—" he picked up the ramen packet, squinting at its ingredients. "Nine thousand milligrams of MSG. Now go on, get moving."

Jason tramped up the back stairs, muttering things Bruce pretended not to hear, or the poor kid would be broke before breakfast. "Twenty _dollars?_ " said a voice from behind him, and he turned to see Dick leaning against the archway to the garden, his eyebrows raised to the sky, his sweatshirt stained and rumpled. There was a Bludhaven police logo on the shoulder. Bruce smiled and reached to pour him a cup of coffee. Only Dick could move quietly enough to get the drop on him, and only Dick was welcome before breakfast.

"Morning off?" he asked, handing Dick the coffee.

"Seriously, Bruce, twenty dollars? American? Because please tell me that's in pesos or something. That's twice the allowance I got. What the hell? I demand reparations."

"Well, that seems just. Maybe if your income was increased you could afford laundry detergent. Also, watch your mouth. I just told Jason no swearing, so let's try to set an example."

"Fuck that." Dick gulped the coffee. "I mean, hey, I get what you're trying to do and all, and it's very noble, but you don't think this is kind of an uphill battle here?"

Bruce poured himself another cup. "In what way?"

"In what way, he asks. Jason's a street kid, you're not going to turn him into—" Dick waved his hand. "You know, some kid you can stick in a suit and introduce at society luncheons, captain of the Gotham Academy mathletes. He's a smart-ass, angry, conniving little twit."

"Maybe he reminds me of someone I once knew."

"Hey, I was never—"

"I didn't mean you. And cut him some slack. He's a good kid. I'm not trying to turn him into you. But he can be more than he is, and more than his past makes him."

Dick gave a sharp laugh at that, and drained the last of his coffee. "He's a lot of things, Bruce, but a good kid is not among them. Trust me on this one." He slid a hand on Bruce's shoulder, setting his coffee on the drainboard. The motion rucked up the edge of Bruce's T-shirt sleeve, and though he quickly moved to cover, he knew Dick had seen the livid contusion that ringed his upper arm.

"Let me guess," said Dick, his voice gone grim. "Patrol, night before last?"

"It's fine," said Bruce. 

"Right. Looks like that doesn't hurt at all. Are you gonna tell me that would have happened, if you'd had a partner out there who actually had your back?"

Bruce gave him a gimlet stare, but it was amazing how ineffective those were on Dick these days. He wanted to say it wouldn't have made a difference, but he thought of ten years ago, and how he had been dead against taking Dick on patrol with him—how it had been Clark who had begun Dick's training, Clark who had given him the necessary push. For all his initial resistance, there was no denying that the minute he had Dick beside him, all of a sudden there hadn't seemed to be as many bruises, as many wounds for Alfred to stitch the next morning. "The boy will learn," he said. 

"He fucking better." And he had slipped out the side door before Bruce had a rejoinder for that one, or even an answering glare.

* * *

For the next few weeks, the progress was erratic, but nonetheless tangible. Tangible at first in the mounting pile of cash in the big blue jar in the kitchen, but tangible too in Jason's occasional restraint, now. At first he had groaned, he had moaned, he had flailed, he had even cursed—another four dollars lost on that one—but at least he had (more or less) arrived at the point where Bruce could hear him actually listening before he spoke. If it taught the boy some mindfulness, the whole ridiculous exercise was worth it. If nothing else, it was slowing the flurry of demerit notices from Gotham Academy. 

But what really got Jason behind the program was watching Bruce toss the odd bill into the jar. That thrilled him no end, and when he suspected Bruce was cheating by confining himself to Tibetan expletives (he was, of course) he appealed to Alfred to adjudicate. Alfred had simply raised those leonine eyebrows and said, "My apologies, Master Bruce." 

"Betrayed," Bruce had muttered, tossing a dollar in the jar. Alfred had looked pointedly at the jar. 

"Actually, sir," he had said, "I detected two distinct words, both examples of ungentle language, if I may say so. Their prefixes were quite similar, but it was in fact two separate words, not one. I occupied my time with study of Asian languages, when I was stationed in Burma."

Bruce tossed in another dollar. "It is a traitorous dog who hears not the cry of his master in need," he said in Masai, because Alfred could not have been stationed absolutely everywhere in the world.

"And a foolish master who leaves the hut unguarded," replied Alfred, completing the proverb in English. "In point of fact, sir, the word for 'traitorous' in Masai has distinctly obscene overtones, being derived from the same root as 'man-who-copulates-with-pregnant-cow.' I think we will have to call that another one, I'm afraid, sir."

Bruce pitched the wallet at Alfred's head and retreated before he started losing stock options; he knew better than to ever go head-to-head with Alfred. There was the distinct sound, behind him, of a high five being exchanged, and he smiled on the stairs. If this was building a little camaraderie between Jason and Alfred, then that was worth every dollar in his wallet, not to mention the black card. Of course, after that, Jason became a man on a mission, watching every word out of Bruce's mouth. Bruce began to suspect the boy was boobytrapping the house, just to see if Bruce would forget himself and swear in vivid technicolor. He couldn't think why else there would be a spilled slick of shampoo in the middle of the hallway, or superglue glistening on the handle of his hairbrush.

But at least it was something that brought Jason joy, and he'd had so little of that. So little opportunity to behave like any other slightly ridiculous twelve-year-old boy; so little opportunity to erase the dark wariness in those eyes and just play, like he should have been allowed to years ago. 

He said as much to Clark, one night tinkering with rewiring the plasma emitters on his belt down in the cave. "So you think a little bit of normal childhood is all the boy needs?" Clark said from the monitor, and Bruce saw the arch of his brow at that. 

"It's not impossible," Bruce said curtly. They were speaking Kryptonian, because Jason was stretched on the cot in the corner working on his algebra homework, and while Bruce could follow easily enough, Kryptonian, with its triple-inflected verbs and kaleidoscopically shifting noun cases, required too much concentration for him to express himself at greater length—especially when confronted with a wiring problem. He studied his schematics again, frowning at the routing's unexpected thorniness; it had seemed very clear when he had imagined it in the shower this morning. 

"Normal, huh," Clark said. "You sure you know what you're doing, with him?"

"Not you too. Don't you start."

"I'm not starting anything. You're aware he's running a betting pool?"

Bruce zapped his fingers and bit his lip to bite back the expletives. He saw Jason's head lift hopefully from his textbook. "Betting pool?" He wasn't sure he'd understood the Kryptonian phrase. 

"Oh yes. He's gotten Alfred and Dick in on it too. The next one who can make you swear—really swear, loudly and in English—wins the entire contents of the jar."

Despite himself, Bruce gave a bark of a laugh. "Is that so," he said. Onscreen, he could see Clark tipping his head thoughtfully.

"No," he said, "Dick is right. There's no way you can be the same person who raised him. How is this not infuriating you?"

"Don't know." But he found himself smiling again, imagining Jason's little conspiracy. "But anything that has Dick talking to Jason is a good thing, as far as I'm concerned. What?" he said, because Clark had winced slightly.

"Nothing."

"Say it," he growled.

"It was a really small thing. It's just that, 'is a good thing' should be potential optative, because all good is understood to be impermanent and more or less illusory."

Bruce tossed the miniscule pliers down, sending up a rain of sparks that caught him in the face and fingers. He swore with guttural ferocity, but mercifully he had already been speaking Kryptonian, and this was one language where Jason couldn't catch him out. Still, Jason was sitting all the way up now, his look of eager anticipation unmistakable. 

"Was that swearing?" he said.

"I was reciting holy texts," gritted Bruce. "It's a common Kryptonian exercise, in the face of frustration. Jason. Did you sabotage my belt just so I would swear?"

Jason's face went wide and innocent. Bruce ground his teeth. "Go upstairs," he said. "Games stop at the door of this cave, understand? Now go finish your homework, I'll be up in a bit."

He waited until he heard the tunnel entrance slide shut before hurling the pliers across the cave. They ricocheted off a rock. Petty, but satisfying. "Holy texts, huh," Clark said mildly. "Well, next time you're reciting scripture, you might try being a little less insulting to my mother." 

Bruce clicked off the monitor, suppressing the oath out of sheer willpower.

* * *

Dick was back for coffee on Saturday morning, which was more or less his custom: generally he would stop by the house or the cave at least once a week, plus Saturday mornings. Even a late-riser like Dick knew better than to miss a chance of Alfred's blueberry pancakes, with crème fraîche and powdered sugar on top, and he was plowing through his second stack with gusto. 

"Feel like sticking around for a bit?" Bruce asked, figuring he should strike while the pancakes were warm. "I've got to get up to the Watchtower and see if those diagnostics were successful, and I can't check on those through remote access. I promised Alfred the morning off, after he finished making more of—that," he gestured at the syrup-drizzled stack on Dick's plate, "so that leaves Jason on his own for a bit. It shouldn't be a problem since he normally sleeps til noon on Saturdays. Can you stay?"

"Sure," said Dick, around a mouthful of crème. "But I feel I should point out, he is twelve."

"And I should point out, he is Jason."

"Your point's better," Dick acknowledged with a wave of his fork.

"Almost got it," called Clark, coming up from the cave stairs. He was wiping his hands on a rag, and Bruce narrowed his eyes at it.

"Hazardous disposal is downstairs, not in the kitchen."

"Ingrate," said Clark. "Hey, Dick."

"Hey, what's up?"

"Well, we've been configuring the cave's computer system to interface with Kryptonian technology. It's been kind of a bigger project than I had figured on. But this way the cave can have access to the Fortress's database, and from there, the Watchtower interface should be able to translate some of the information—or at least, part of it; a huge part of it's not ever going to be compatible with any Terran system, but in the middle of the night I realized the problem was less neurotech and more physics. This crylenium-based oil ought to make the interchanges run smoother. Mm, pancakes. Deal me in, Alfred?"

"Always, Mr. Kent."

"That was really more of a polite 'what's up' than a 'hey, can I have an engineering lecture,' but thanks," said Dick, ducking a crylenium-soaked rag aimed at his head. 

"Mind the intergalactic waste," clucked Alfred, plucking the offending object out of Dick's hair. "Ah, good morning, Master Jason, to what do we owe the pleasure of seeing your handsome face this early on a Saturday morning?"

Jason marched up to the breakfast table and slammed a piece of paper down on it in triumph. "Pay up," he said to Bruce. They all looked at him.

"I beg your pardon?" said Bruce.

"Pay. Up." Jason rocked back on his heels. He had even pulled on jeans, though he was still wearing last night's T-shirt, and yesterday's hair. "I got you, man, I so got you. Read it and weep." And he picked up the piece of paper, waving it in the air. "Right here, bam, the fu—for true evidence. Bruce Wayne, you are busted."

Bruce arched a single brow. "Care to elaborate?"

"Sure, you bet I do. You cussed last night."

"I sincerely doubt that."

"Yeah? You shouldn't. I couldn't sleep, so I figured I'd get a head start on that geography project, only I couldn't make sense of that stupid-ass. . .as heck textbook, so I came up to your room to get some help."

Bruce set his coffee cup down. 

"I heard you," Jason said smugly. "You said 'fuck.' You yelled it. Really loud. Other stuff, too. Here, I'll read it." He held up his list. "Fuck. Fuck fuck fuuuuck fuck. Fucking hell. Jesus Christ. Fuck yes, fuck—"

The spray of Dick's coffee arched across the table and hit the opposite wall with explosive force. Bruce sat still, with little need to compose his face because all his facial tissue had gone quite numb. "Jesus fucking fuck," Jason read calmly, and Dick began coughing so hard he sounded like he was going to bring up a lung.

"You okay?" said Jason, and Dick waved him off. "Go on," he rasped. 

"Christ, goddammit, fuck yes, sh—"

Bruce rose, snatched the list, and crumpled it. Beside him, Clark was calmly plowing through his stack of pancakes, as though nothing of concern was happening. Dick's coughing fit had slid into apoplexy; he was red-faced and rocking back and forth in a silent seizure. Briefly Bruce fantasized about a quick slice up his midsection with a Batarang.

"My list!" Jason said. "You gotta pay up!"

Bruce slapped his wallet on the table. "Jason," he tried, through clenched teeth. "Last night. I stubbed my toe."

"Oh. Okay. Well, you still gotta pay up. You musta stubbed your toe a lot."

"Repeatedly," Clark said, stabbing another pile of pancakes. Bruce shot him a murderous glance. Dick had progressed beyond the ability of human medical attention. Bruce dug a fifty out of his wallet, tossed it in the jar. Jason was still staring, so Bruce tossed in another fifty, figuring that was probably more accurate anyway, and stalked off to the stairs with the tattered shreds of his dignity wrapped around him.

* * *

"Master Jason," said Alfred firmly, when he had gone. "In this house, we do not invade one another's privacy."

"What? _What?_ What'd I do? I didn't invade anyone's privacy. He's the one oughta be worried about invading people's privacy, I could hear him all the way down the hall."

Dick swallowed enough air for a strangled gurgle at that, but Clark set aside his pancakes. "Alfred's right," he said. "And the three of you, with your little contest, I hope you've learned your lesson. And the lesson," he added, with a swipe of napkin to his lips, "is this. I will always win. And now, I believe I will be collecting my prize." 

He tucked the swear jar under his arm and headed for the stairs. There might be hell to pay, worse than the devil and all his angels, at the top of those stairs, but sometimes—well, sometimes, that was the price of goddamn victory.


End file.
